The Third Policeman

by Flann O'Brien

  ‘And feels,’ the Sergeant said. ‘Now there is nothing so smooth as a woman’s back or so you might imagine. But if that feel is broken up for you, you would not be pleased with women’s backs, I’ll promise you that on my solemn oath and parsley. Half of the inside of the smoothness is as rough as a bullock’s hips.’

  ‘The next time you come here,’ MacCruiskeen promised, ‘you will see surprising things.’

  This in itself, I thought, was a surprising thing for anyone to say after what I had just seen and after what I was carrying in the bag. He groped in his pocket, found his cigarette, relit it and proffered me the match. Hampered with the heavy bag, I was some minutes finding mine but the match still burnt evenly and brightly at its end.

  We smoked in silence and went on through the dim passage till we reached the lift again. There were clock-faces or dials beside the open lift which I had not seen before and another pair of doors beside it. I was very tired with my bag of gold and clothes and whiskey and made for the lift to stand on it and put the bag down at last. When nearly on the threshold I was arrested in my step by a call from the Sergeant which rose nearly to the pitch of a woman’s scream.

  ‘Don’t go in there!’

  The colour fled from my face at the urgency of his tone. I turned my head round and stood rooted there with one foot before the other like a man photographed unknowingly in the middle of a walk.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the floor will collapse underneath the bottom of your feet and send you down where nobody went before you.’

  ‘And why?’

  ‘The bag, man.’

  ‘The simple thing is,’ MacCruiskeen said calmly, ‘that you cannot enter the lift unless you weigh the same weight as you weighed when you weighed into it.’

  ‘If you do,’ said the Sergeant, ‘it will extirpate you unconditionally and kill the life out of you.’

  I put the bag, clinking with its bottle and gold cubes, rather roughly on the floor. It was worth several million pounds. Standing there on the plate floor, I leaned on the plate wall and searched my wits for some reason and understanding and consolation-in-adversity. I understood little except that my plans were vanquished and my visit to eternity unavailing and calamitous. I wiped a hand on my damp brow and stared blankly at the two policemen, who were now smiling and looking knowledgeable and complacent. A large emotion came swelling against my throat and filling my mind with great sorrow and a sadness more remote and desolate than a great strand at evening with the sea far away at its distant turn. Looking down with a bent head at my broken shoes, I saw them swim and dissolve in big tears that came bursting on my eyes. I turned to the wall and gave loud choking sobs and broke down completely and cried loudly like a baby. I do not know how long I was crying. I think I heard the two policemen discussing me in sympathetic undertones as if they were trained doctors in a hospital. Without lifting my head I looked across the floor and saw MacCruiskeen’s legs walking away with my bag. Then I heard an oven door being opened and the bag fired roughly in. Here I cried loudly again, turning to the wall of the lift and giving complete rein to my great misery.

  At last I was taken gently by the shoulders, weighed and guided into the lift. Then I felt the two large policemen crowding in beside me and got the heavy smell of blue official broadcloth impregnated through and through with their humanity. As the floor of the lift began to resist my feet, I felt a piece of crisp paper rustling against my averted face. Looking up in the poor light I saw that MacCruiskeen was stretching his hand in my direction dumbly and meekly across the chest of the Sergeant who was standing tall and still beside me. In the hand was a small white paper bag. I glanced into it and saw round coloured things the size of florins.

  ‘Creams,’ MacCruiskeen said kindly.

  He shook the bag encouragingly and started to chew and suck loudly as if there was almost supernatural pleasure to be had from these sweetmeats. Beginning for some reason to sob again, I put my hand into the bag but when I took a sweet, three or four others which had merged with it in the heat of the policeman’s pocket came out with it in one sticky mass of plaster. Awkwardly and foolishly I tried to disentangle them but failed completely and then rammed the lot into my mouth and stood there sobbing and sucking and snuffling. I heard the Sergeant sighing heavily and could feel his broad flank receding as he sighed.

  ‘Lord, I love sweets,’ he murmured.

  ‘Have one,’ MacCruiskeen smiled, rattling his bag.

  ‘What are you saying, man,’ the Sergeant cried, turning to view MacCruiskeen’s face, ‘are you out of your mind, man alive? If I took one of these – not one but half of a corner of the quarter of one of them – I declare to the Hokey that my stomach would blow up like a live landmine and I would be galvanized in my bed for a full fortnight roaring out profanity from terrible stoons of indigestion and heartscalds. Do you want to kill me, man?’

  ‘Sugar barley is a very smooth sweet,’ MacCruiskeen said, speaking awkwardly with his bulging mouth. ‘They give it to babies and it is a winner for the bowels.’

  ‘If I ate sweets at all,’ the Sergeant said, ‘I would live on the ”Carnival Assorted”. Now there is a sweet for you. There is great sucking in them, the flavour is very spiritual and one of them is good for half an hour.’

  ‘Did you ever try Liquorice Pennies?’ asked MacCruiskeen.

  ‘Not them but the “Fourpenny Coffee-Cream Mixture” have a great charm.’

  ‘Or the Dolly Mixture?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘They say,’ MacCruiskeen said, ‘that the Dolly Mixture is the best that was ever made and that it will never be surpassed and indeed I could eat them and keep eating till I got sick.’

  ‘That may be,’ the Sergeant said, ‘but if I had my health I would give you a good run for it with the Carnival Mixture.’

  As they wrangled on about sweets and passed to chocolate bars and sticks of rock, the floor was pressing strongly from underneath. Then there was a change in the pressing, two clicks were heard and the Sergeant started to undo the doors, explaining to MacCruiskeen his outlook on Ju-jubes and jelly-sweets and Turkish Delights.

  With sloped shoulders and a face that was stiff from my dried tears, I stepped wearily out of the lift into the little stone room and waited till they had checked the clocks. Then I followed them into the thick bushes and kept behind them as they met the attacks of the branches and fought back. I did not care much.

  It was not until we emerged, breathless and with bleeding hands, on the green margin of the main road that I realized that a strange thing had happened. It was two or three hours since the Sergeant and I had started on our journey yet the country and the trees and all the voices of every thing around still wore an air of early morning. There was incommunicable earliness in everything, a sense of waking and beginning. Nothing had yet grown or matured and nothing begun had yet finished. A bird singing had not yet turned finally the last twist of tunefulness. A rabbit emerging still had a hidden tail.

  The Sergeant stood monumentally in the middle of the hard grey road and picked some small green things delicately from his person. MacCruiskeen stood stooped in knee-high grass looking over his person and shaking himself sharply like a hen. I stood myself looking wearily into the bright sky and wondering over the wonders of the high morning.

  When the Sergeant was ready he made a polite sign with his thumb and the two of us set off together in the direction of the barrack. MacCruiskeen was behind but he soon appeared silently in front of us, sitting without a move on the top of his quiet bicycle. He said nothing as he passed us and stirred no breath or limb and he rolled away from us down the gentle hill till a bend received him silently.

  As I walked with the Sergeant I did not notice where we were or what we passed by on the road, men, beasts or houses. My brain was like an ivy near where swallows fly. Thoughts were darting around me like a sky that was loud and dark with birds but none came into me or near enough. Forever in my ear was the click of he
avy shutting doors, the whine of boughs trailing their loose leaves in a swift springing and the clang of hobnails on metal plates.

  When I reached the barrack I paid no attention to anything or anybody but went straight to a bed and lay on it and fell into a full and simple sleep. Compared with this sleep, death is a restive thing, peace is a clamour and darkness a burst of light.

  Chapter 9

  I was awakened the following morning by sounds of loud hammering1 outside the window and found myself immediately recalling – the recollection was an absurd paradox – that I had been in the next world yesterday. Lying there half awake, it is not unnatural that my thoughts should turn to de Selby. Like all the greater thinkers, he has been looked to for guidance on many of the major perplexities of existence. The commentators, it is to be feared, have not succeeded in extracting from the vast store-house of his writings any consistent, cohesive or comprehensive corpus of spiritual belief and praxis. Nevertheless, his ideas of paradise are not without interest. Apart from the contents of the famous de Selby ‘Codex’,2 the main references are to be found in the Rural Atlas and in the so-called ‘substantive’ appendices to the Country Album. Briefly he indicates that the happy state is ‘not unassociated with water’ and that ‘water is rarely absent from any wholly satisfactory situation’. He does not give any closer definition of this hydraulic elysium but mentions that he has written more fully on the subject elsewhere.3 It is not clear, unfortunately, whether the reader is expected to infer that a wet day is more enjoyable than a dry one or that a lengthy course of baths is a reliable method of achieving peace of mind. He praises the equilibrium of water, its circumambiency, equiponderance and equitableness, and declares that water, ‘if not abused’4 can achieve ‘absolute superiority.’ For the rest, little remains save the record of his obscure and unwitnessed experiments. The story is one of a long succession of prosecutions for water wastage at the suit of the local authority. At one hearing it was shown that he had used 9,000 gallons in one day and on another occasion almost 80,000 gallons in the course of a week. The word ‘used’ in this context is the important one. The local officials, having checked the volume of water entering the house daily from the street connection, had sufficient curiosity to watch the outlet sewer and made the astonishing discovery that none of the vast quantity of water drawn in ever left the house. The commentators have seized avidly on this statistic but are, as usual, divided in their interpretations. In Bassett’s view the water was treated in the patent water-box and diluted to a degree that made it invisible – in the guise of water, at all events – to the untutored watchers at the sewer. Hatchjaw’s theory in this regard is more acceptable. He tends to the view that the water was boiled and converted, probably through the water-box, into tiny jets of steam which were projected through an upper window into the night in an endeavour to wash the black ‘volcanic’ stains from the ‘skins’ or ‘air-bladders’ of the atmosphere and thus dissipate the hated and ‘insanitary’ night. However far-fetched this theory may appear, unexpected colour is lent to it by a previous court case when the physicist was fined forty shillings. On this occasion, some two years before the construction of the water-box, de Selby was charged with playing a fire hose out of one of the upper windows of his house at night, an operation which resulted in several passers-by being drenched to the skin. On another occasion5 he had to face the curious charge of hoarding water, the police testifying that every vessel in his house, from the bath down to a set of three ornamental egg-cups, was brimming with the liquid. Again a trumped-up charge of attempted suicide was preferred merely because the savant had accidentally half-drowned himself in a quest for some vital statistic of celestial aquatics.

  It is clear from contemporary newspapers that his inquiries into water were accompanied by persecutions and legal pin-prickings unparalleled since the days of Galileo. It may be some consolation to the minions responsible to know that their brutish and barbaric machinations succeeded in denying posterity a clear record of the import of these experiments and perhaps a primer of esoteric water science that would banish much of our worldly pain and unhappiness. Virtually all that remains of de Selby’s work in this regard is his house where his countless taps6 are still as he left them, though a newer generation of more delicate mind has had the water turned off at the main.

  Water? The word was in my ear as well as in my brain. Rain was beginning to beat on the windows, not a soft or friendly rain but large angry drops which came spluttering with great force upon the glass. The sky was grey and stormy and out of it I heard the harsh shouts of wild geese and ducks labouring across the wind on their coarse pinions. Black quails called sharply from their hidings and a swollen stream was babbling dementedly. Trees, I knew, would be angular and ill-tempered in the rain and boulders would gleam coldly at the eye.

  I would have sought sleep again without delay were it not for the loud hammering outside. I arose and went on the cold floor to the window. Outside there was a man with sacks on his shoulders hammering at a wooden framework he was erecting in the barrack yard. He was red-faced and strong-armed and limped around his work with enormous stiff strides. His mouth was full of nails which bristled like steel fangs in the shadow of his moustache. He extracted them one by one as I watched and hammered them perfectly into the wet wood. He paused to test a beam with his great strength and accidentally let the hammer fall. He stooped awkwardly and picked it up.

  Did you notice anything?

  No.

  The Hammer, man.

  It looks an ordinary hammer. What about it? You must be blind. It fell on his foot. Yes?

  And he didn’t bat an eyelid. It might have been a feather for all the sign he gave.

  Here I gave a sharp cry of perception and immediately threw up the sash of the window and leaned out into the inhospitable day, hailing the workman excitedly. He looked at me curiously and came over with a friendly frown of interrogation on his face.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘O’Feersa, the middle brother,’ he answered. ‘Will you come out here,’ he continued, ‘and give me a hand with the wet carpentry?’

  ‘Have you a wooden leg?’

  For answer he dealt his left thigh a mighty blow with the hammer. It echoed hollowly in the rain. He cupped his hand clownishly at his ear as if listening intently to the noise he had made. Then he smiled.

  ‘I am building a high scaffold here,’ he said, ‘and it is lame work where the ground is bumpy. I could find use for the assistance of a competent assistant.’

  ‘Do you know Martin Finnucane?’

  He raised his hand in a military salute and nodded.

  ‘He is almost a relation,’ he said, ‘but not completely. He is closely related to my cousin but they never married, never had the time.’

  Here I knocked my own leg sharply on the wall.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I asked him.

  He gave a start and then shook my hand and looked brotherly and loyal, asking me was it the left or the right?

  Scribble a note and send him for assistance. There is no time to lose.

  I did so at once, asking Martin Finnucane to come and save me in the nick of time from being strangled to death on the scaffold and telling him he would have to hurry. I did not know whether he could come as he had promised he would but in my present danger anything was worth trying.

  I saw Mr O’Feersa going quickly away through the mists and threading his path carefully through the sharp winds which were racing through the fields, his head down, sacks on his shoulders and resolution in his heart.

  Then I went back to bed to try to forget my anxiety. I said a prayer that neither of the other brothers was out on the family bicycle because it would be wanted to bring my message quickly to the captain of the one-leggèd men. Then I felt a hope kindling fitfully within me and I fell asleep again.

  Chapter 10

  When I awoke again two thoughts came into my head so closely together that they seemed to be st
uck to one another; I could not be sure which came first and it was hard to separate them and examine them singly. One was a happy thought about the weather, the sudden brightness of the day that had been vexed earlier. The other was suggesting to me that it was not the same day at all but a different one and maybe not even the next day after the angry one. I could not decide that question and did not try to. I lay back and took to my habit of gazing out of the window. Whichever day it was, it was a gentle day – mild, magical and innocent with great sailings of white cloud serene and impregnable in the high sky, moving along like kingly swans on quiet water. The sun was in the neighbourhood also, distributing his enchantment unobtrusively, colouring the sides of things that were unalive and livening the hearts of living things. The sky was a light blue without distance, neither near nor far. I could gaze at it, through it and beyond it and see still illimitably clearer and nearer the delicate lie of its nothingness. A bird sang a solo from nearby, a cunning blackbird in a dark hedge giving thanks in his native language. I listened and agreed with him completely.

  Then other sounds came to me from the nearby kitchen. The policemen were up and about their incomprehensible tasks. A pair of their great boots would clump across the flags, pause and then clump back. The other pair would clump to another place, stay longer and clump back again with heavier falls as if a great weight were being carried. Then the four boots would clump together solidly far away to the front door and immediately would come the long slash of thrown-water on the road, a great bath of it flung in a lump to fall flat on the dry ground.

  I arose and started to put on my clothes. Through the window I could see the scaffold of raw timber rearing itself high into the heavens, not as O’Feersa had left it to make his way methodically through the rain, but perfect and ready for its dark destiny. The sight did not make me cry or even sigh. I thought it was sad, too sad. Through the struts of the structure I could see the good country. There would be a fine view from the top of the scaffold on any day but on this day it would be lengthened out by five miles owing to the clearness of the air. To prevent my tears I began to give special attention to my dressing.